WHEN the great meetings of the witan were over, most Anglo-Saxon bishops returned to cathedral communities and dioceses that were more diverse than they were similar. At this level, the Church was little more than a network of relationships, not an institution in the modern sense, and ecclesiastical response to the often awesome uncertainties of the period depended as much on the abilities of individual bishops as it did on the institutional framework of the Church. Lack of uniformity on many levels underscores the Anglo-Saxon Church's decentralized character. Despite the unity of purpose and vision reflected in the prescriptive literature, bishops were more or less on their own in their dioceses. Beyond the provision of texts and the reinforcement of expectations at synods, there were as yet no mechanisms for assuring uniformity across the kingdom. Cathedral churches, too, must have been idiosyncratic in a variety of ways, from the number of priests who served them and the type of lifestyle they practiced to the nature of their interaction with their episcopal leaders and other priests in their dioceses. Most of these issues cannot be addressed in their entirety even for the larger sees like Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester, which have relatively substantial archives. Few, if any, of the surviving sources were created for the purpose of illuminating cathedral culture in late Anglo-Saxon England, although some information can be gleaned from anecdotal narrative, liturgical, canonical, homiletic and legal evidence.

The discussion can be broadened, however, by a consideration of the thousand or so extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, many of which were produced by and for episcopal communities. Like the prescriptive material in homilies and synodical documents, they cannot necessarily get us closer to actual practice. It is still difficult, for instance, despite much recent scholarly attention, to ascertain where many manuscripts were both written and used. At the same time, it would be imprudent to argue that the mere possession of manuscripts necessarily implies that a community subscribed to their contents. It is always possible that books sat on shelves unused, although given the cost of preparing them, this seems unlikely to have been a common practice.